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Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
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Start Reading- Publisher:
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Released:
- Jul 1, 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780547370224
- Format:
- Book
Description
Book Actions
Start ReadingBook Information
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
Description
- Publisher:
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Released:
- Jul 1, 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780547370224
- Format:
- Book
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Animal Farm - George Orwell
Footnotes
First Mariner edition 2009
Copyright 1945 by Eric Blair
This edition copyright © the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1987
Note on the Text copyright © Peter Davison, 1989
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
First published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1945
This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in the Complete Works of George Orwell series 1987
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN 978-0-15-107255-2
eISBN 978-0-547-37022-4
v5.0218
A Note on the Text
Animal Farm was published in England on 17 August 1945 and one year later in the United States. Until Animal Farm the total print-run of Orwell’s nine books (including Inside the Whale and The Lion and the Unicorn) in Britain and America amounted to some 195,500 copies. Of these, 47,079 were of The Road to Wigan Pier and 115,000 were Penguin editions of Down and Out in Paris and London (1940) and Burmese Days (1944). Shortage of paper after the World War II restricted the number of copies of Animal Farm printed in Britain, but 25,500 copies had been issued by the time Orwell died in January 1950, and 590,000 in America. These figures give quantitative support to the enormous and immediate success of Animal Farm, and they are backed up by the range and variety of the translations made during the few remaining years of Orwell’s life—translations into all the principal European languages, as well as Persian, Telugu, Icelandic, and Ukrainian. But what genre of book was being offered to these different publics? The most important textual variant of Animal Farm affects its title-page. Orwell called his book, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. This is the description given in all editions published by Secker & Warburg and Penguin Books but the Americans dropped A Fairy Story from the outset. (One of the many publishers who declined to publish Animal Farm in Britain and America did so because he considered there was no market for children’s books.) Only in Telugu, of all the translations made in Orwell’s lifetime, was A Fairy Story retained. In other translations the subtitle was dropped or became A Satire, A Contemporary Satire, or was described as an adventure or tale. This is not the place to discuss the significance of the original subtitle, except, perhaps, to point out that it stems from Orwell’s abiding fascination for fairy stories and the like encountered during early childhood, in his work as a teacher, and his time at the BBC.
Typescripts of two of Orwell’s books have survived—Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four—in addition to an author’s proof for Animal Farm. The number of textual variants is relatively few. When the text was prepared for the English printer, variations in capitalisation and spelling were smoothed out (so that Orwell’s ‘hay field’, ‘hay-field’ and ‘hayfield’ all became one word) and, on average, the punctuation was changed twice on each page. For this edition Orwell’s punctuation has been preferred and what may be a subtle shift from ‘seven commandments’ (page 15, line 17) to ‘Seven Commandments’ (e.g., page 21, lines 2–3), after they have become sacrosanct, is restored. In 1945 the pigeons were not permitted to drop dung on Mr Jones and his men (page 26, line 23), but were required, obscurely, to ‘mute’ upon them instead to avoid offending readers’ susceptibilities.
Of the two most interesting textual characteristics of Animal Farm, apart from its genre subtitle, one is a change made just in time for the first edition and the other is an afterthought that cannot properly be incorporated.
In March 1945 Orwell was in Paris working as a war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. He there met Joseph Czapski, a survivor of Soviet concentration camps and the Katyn Massacre. Despite the latter’s experiences and his opposition to the Soviet regime, he explained to Orwell (as Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler) that ‘it was the character of Stalin . . . the greatness of Stalin’ that saved Russia from the German invasion. ‘He stayed in Moscow when the Germans nearly took it, and his courage was what saved the situation.’ In Animal Farm, although parallels to historical personages are not exact, Stalin is certainly represented by Napoleon.¹ A few days after meeting Czapski, Orwell wrote to his publishers asking for the text to be changed in chapter VIII (in this edition page 69, line 22). Instead of ‘all the animals, including Napoleon,’ falling to the ground, he wanted, ‘all the animals, except Napoleon’. This alteration, he wrote, ‘would be fair to Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance’.
At the end of 1946, Orwell prepared an adaptation of Animal Farm for the BBC Third Programme. On 2 December Dwight Macdonald, editor of the American journal Politics, and a friend of Orwell’s, wrote saying he assumed Animal Farm applied only to Russia and that Orwell was not making any larger statement about the philosophy of revolution. Orwell replied that though Animal Farm was ‘primarily a satire on the Russian Revolution’ it was intended to have a wider application. That kind of revolution, which he defined as ‘violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people’, could only lead to a change of masters. He went on: ‘I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves’, and he referred to the naval mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921 when the sailors supported those striking in Leningrad against the Soviet regime. Realising that the turning-point in the novel was not clear enough, he added these lines of dialogue to the radio adaptation he was just then completing:
CLOVER: Do you think that is quite fair to appropriate the apples?
MOLLY: What, keep all the apples for themselves?
MURIEL: Aren’t we to have any?
COW: I thought they were going to be shared out equally.
The significance of these lines was lost on the BBC producer, Rayner Heppenstall, who cut them out. As Orwell did not revise Animal Farm, it is beyond an editor’s remit to add them to the book, but they do highlight what Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer was the ‘key passage’ of Animal Farm.
PETER DAVISON
Albany, London
Chapter I
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.
As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr Jones was safely out of the way. Old Major (so he was always called, though the name under which he had been exhibited was Willingdon Beauty) was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour’s sleep in order to hear what he had to say.
At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam. He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut. Before long the other animals began to arrive and make themselves comfortable after their different fashions. First came the three dogs, Bluebell, Jessie and Pincher, and then the pigs, who settled down in the straw immediately in front of the platform. The hens perched themselves on the window-sills, the pigeons fluttered up to the rafters, the sheep and cows lay down behind the pigs and began to chew the cud. The two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover, came in together, walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work. After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Nevertheless, without openly admitting it, he was devoted to Boxer; the two of them usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.
The two horses had just lain down when a brood of ducklings which had lost their mother filed into the barn, cheeping feebly and wandering from side to side to find some place where they would not be trodden on. Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep. At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with. Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major’s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.
All the animals were now present except Moses, the tame raven, who slept on a perch behind the back door. When Major saw that they had all made themselves comfortable and were waiting attentively he cleared his throat and began:
‘Comrades, you have heard already about the strange dream that I had last night. But I will come to the dream later. I have something else to say first. I do not think, comrades, that I shall be with you for many months longer, and before I die I feel it my duty to pass
Reviews
I'm not sure how many times I've read Animal Farm, and I don't know that I have anything particularly profound to say about the book itself that hasn't been said many times before and often more eloquently. What I do want to say, though, is how much I enjoyed this particular audiobook edition read by Simon Callow. The various voices and accents he gives to the characters are great fun: in particular he seems to be channelling Robbie Coltrane for the voice of Napoleon! A very entertaining reading of a classic from Orwell.
I was apparently one of the few I know that never read this book in high school or college, and also never studied the Russian Revolution. However, based on what I've read about it, Orwell managed to tick everyone off with his version of it, played out through the various animal characters. This book is a teacher/professor's dream of a book to discuss in class.
The characters are so rich, so highly developed - you either want to stretch through the book and protect them to no end, or just do away with them for being such jerks! Orwell so eloquently chooses just the right animals to match their "human" counterparts. I found myself cheering for Boxer (equated on some sites as "the working peasant population") and really hating pigs in general.
Fantastically and wonderfully surprised - I'm looking forward to reading more Orwell as a result.
Well, and then I saw it on the ridiculous list of one hundred books -- or whatever it is -- that someone thinks most people will only have read six of. So I mooched it and decided to read it soon, in a spirit of defiance. Not that I wasn't doing well already, with fifty-seven books...
Anyway. The book itself is easy to read. Easier than I was expecting, maybe. I know someone who decided to discount it because it's "about talking animals" and "no one could take that seriously". It's meant to be a fairy tale type thing, though; it's meant to reflect on the truth. It's political writing. It's perhaps less comprehensible to people who didn't live through the Cold War -- communism wasn't really that much of an issue in my life except that there were vague references to it in history class and it came up once I started doing some philosophy at university.
I've read other reviews saying it's too easy to read, too simplistic. I'd have to agree that it can't cover all the complexities of history and politics and people. But I don't think it's meant to, I think it's meant to be a simplified, more universal version, exploring communism-going-wrong. I don't think it necessarily says that communism is impossible, either -- you have to draw that conclusion for yourself.
The writing itself isn't stellar, I suppose, in that it doesn't light fireworks and dance and sing. It's pretty matter-of-fact and down to earth. I liked it a lot, though. I think that added to the ease of reading and understanding.
"All animals are equal; some animals are more equal than others." Sadly, some of this sentiment rings true today. In a world stratified by class, the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. In a way, this book reminded me also of Lord of the Flies. A pre-existing government is overthrown in name of what everyone at first believes might be the best possible ruling, only for things to head steadily downhill.
Is Animal Farm an important book? Yes, I believe so. It still has themes that hold true today. Is it antiquated? Uh...without being familiar with the Communist regime and its practices...yeah...maybe a little. A student reading this would be better suited with background knowledge than to head into it cold turkey.
It was a good book, but it wasn't amazing. I'm not sure, had I been one of those people in charge of proclaiming "classics", whether I would have put it there. There are universal truths in a lot of books, not necessarily the oldest.